"This is the third lecture in a series titled 'Digital Natives,' referring to the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, especially the young people who are currently in schools and colleges today. The series seeks to understand the practices and culture of the digital natives, the cultural implications of their phenomenon and the implications for education to schools, universities and libraries.

According to Wesch, it took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press appeared and a few hundred again before the telegraph did. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. 'A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges,' Wesch said. 'New types of conversation, argumentation and collaborations are realized.'

Enter YouTube, which is not just a technology. 'It's a social space built around video communication that is searchable, taggable and mashable,' Wesch said. 'It is a space where identities, values and ideas are produced, reproduced, challenged and negotiated in new ways.'"

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"The PLE project recognises the fundamental flaws in Virtual Learning Environments or Learning Management Systems (VLE, LMS), but falls short in its vision of an alternative. At this stage in the project it is suggesting that the PLE be a desktop application for a student (sounds a bit like my old Perfect LMS idea) or a singular portal online.

At risk of sounding like a broken record, I'll have to repeat my defining question about Internet enhanced learning, but this time in response to the PLE.

Question to the PLE: Why do we need a PLE when we already have the Internet? The Internet is my PLE, ePortfolio, VLE what ever. Thanks to blogger, bloglines, flickr, delicious, wikispaces, ourmedia, creative commons, and what ever comes next in this new Internet age, I have a strong online ID and very extensive and personalised learning environment. Actually I think the PLE idea is better envisioned by the futurist concept known as the Evolving Personalised Information Construct (EPIC). I think we already have EPIC, so why do we need the PLE?

To extend the statement: We insignificant little teachers and our out of date schools and classrooms don't need to be investing in media projects like VLEs, LMS and even PLEs. Our dam walls of knowledge have burst! and no amount of sand bagging will stop the flood that is clearly discrediting our authority over learning. Media, and with it communications, will evolve (as it certainly has in the last 50 years or more) well beyond the limitations of our classrooms, with investments and broadcast influence we can't even fathom. Why waste our precious money and time on projects that only serve to suspend our true position within that media scape. The PLE makes me think of ELGG, and it all makes me wonder why it is we educationalists still think we are even relevant anymore. The people (yes that includes us) are learning how to read and write for themselves, and in an amazing act of collective generosity, the people are teaching each other – why do they even need our classrooms... is it perhaps only credentialism that we offer? Or is it also sense of security and safety? Is it false?"

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"Earlier this month flickr announced that short video clips could now be uploaded to the popular photo site. Some photo purists were skeptical, even spawning a huge 'No Video on Flickr' group. After all, the sanctity of the best still images, rich in implied meaning, could be diluted by zillions 90 second video clips of someone's keg party (and we already have other sites, like YouTube for that). Flickr said the ninety–second limit was to encourage 'long photos.' There are contemporary videographers and filmmakers who have used video or film to create sublime still images: the best long photos. And one of my favorites is Godfrey Reggio.

I will never forget the first time I saw Koyaanisqatsi, Reggio's 1983 film about contemporary 'life out of balance.' I was mesmerized by his long drawn out shots. It gave me time to study the scene and, in part, that was the point: to stop moving and consider the consequences of going through life at an increasing interstellar speed. Sometimes there was lots of activity in the frame. But there were times when he pointed his camera at a scene that, on first glance, appeared to be a photograph. It was a still image with all the implications connected with still photography: observations of a slice of frozen time and a consideration of the photographer's framing and associations within that frame.

Yet given the chance to observe closely there was movement. The characters in this 'still' were breathing and blicking and moving. When I saw his scene of Las Vegas waitresses standing still but not still, I was blown away (the vernacular I used in the early 80s when I first saw the film). To this day it is my most favorite scene of any movie I have ever watched. I literally held my breath for its entire duration wondering how long it would go on. The intensity of that shot was immense. It forced me to really look. And that has always been my goal as a photographer: to make people observe what's going on inside my images for as long as I can. That is the mark of a successful photograph. Not so easy in a culture heavy with daily sound and sight bites always vying for our attention and beckoning us to move quickly from one to another."

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Universe – knowing the complete vocabulary, so you know what categories are available

Synonyms – that one of the meanins of ultrasound is the same as sonography.

Hierarchy – a Volvo is a kind of car, is a kind of transportation device.

So here are some ideas for how we could improve folksonomy software to make us better at this, without involving any editors.

Suggest tags for me. A Google Suggest–style interface will help familiarize people with the universe of existing tags, so you can use an existing tag rather than invent your own, when the existing tag applies equally well. It would also reduce typos and inconsistencies, like 'blog' vs. 'blogs', and it might serve as inspiration to get past the obvious tags. The pool of tags suggested from could be a weighted list of my own tags, my friends' tags, all tags, and tags other people have already used for this link.

Find synonyms automatically. In the browsing interface, Flickr is pretty good about showing related tags. Why not show these related tags when I am tagging a photo, thus making it easy for me to just add the ones that apply. They could even do a quick lookup on WordNet for more synonyms. Since the related tags in the browsing interface feeds off of tags used on the same images on the input side, this would also help make strong links stronger.

Help me know what tags other people use. When doing both the Google Suggest and the synonyms above, show the most used tags in a larger size than less used tags. There is value in people using the same tag for the same thing, and we want to encourage that, without in any way preventing people from choosing different tag if they want to.

Infer hiearchy from the tags. I have a habit of using multiword tags, so instead of saying 'socialsoftware' like you're supposed to on delicious, I say 'social software', which really makes it two separate tags. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. If this habit is generally applied, we could look at home many links that are tagged with 'social' are also tagged 'software', and maybe infer that 'social' is frequently used in conjunction with 'software', and thus might imply a special kind of software (or the other way around, that software is a special kind of social), thus offering the combined tag 'social software' to contain links that are tagged with both. A different example would be items tagged 'volvo car'. If most of the time something is tagged 'volvo', it is also tagged 'car', we might infer that volvo is a kind of car.

Make it easy to adjust tags on old content. If the above and other ideas work, people's tagging skills should improve over time. So why not augment the browsing interface so that it's very easy for me to add or remove tags from my iamges or links right there, e.g. from a list of suggested tags on the page, and I'm sure that sometimes, someone would use it. Another incentive to retag my content is if I'm searching for a link on Buenos Aires, but the link wasn't tagged with 'buenosaires', so I find it under 'argentina', say, it should be very easy to add the 'buenosaires' tag to that item."

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"March 2010 will mark the 25th anniversary of the first .com registration. While we know that the first .com was assigned to symbolics.com on March 15, 1985, the genesis of .com is less clear. According to Craig Partridge, chief scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies, the name for domains evolved as the system was created. At first, .cor was proposed as the domain name for corporations, but when the final version came out it was switched to .com.

It took some time for .com to take off. Two and a half years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domain name registrations existed. The early adopters included IBM, Intel, AT&T and Cisco. By 1992, there were still less than 15,000 .com domain names registered and the million–domain name mark wasn't crossed until 1997, well into the Internet boom. Then came the '.com boom', with nearly 20 million names registered in the next two years. The emergence of online businesses as well as early speculative activity fueled the rapid growth.

The burst of the 'bubble' cooled off the rapid growth for a short period, and since then .com has grown at a steady rate, with now more than 80 million domain names registered around the world. Yet, some of the most popular Web sites today were registered late into the .com era. Linkedin.com, for example, was registered in 2002 and flickr.com in 2003. Youtube.com wasn't registered until 2005."